Rosalind C. Barnett

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Brandeis University, Waltham MA, United States

As with other aspects of the psychology of women, the major challenge of research on the work-family interface was, and still is, to assess the validity of our strongly held myths about the nature of women, men, work, and family. In this paper we will look at seven pervasive myths about gender and work: (1) the blissful housewife, (2) the breadwinn...

A major challenge of research on the work-family interface was to understand the complex linkages between women, men, work, and family. The key breakthrough was shattering deeply entrenched gender myths, most centrally that biology defines male and female roles in work and family. Seven potent myths have shaped the growth of the dual-earner family:...

A major challenge of research on the work-family interface was to understand the complex linkages between women, men, work, and family. The key breakthrough was shattering deeply entrenched gender myths, most centrally that biology defines male and female roles in work and family. Seven potent myths have shaped the growth of the dual-earner family:...

A major challenge of research on the work-family interface was to understand the complex linkages between women, men, work, and family. The key breakthrough was shattering deeply entrenched gender myths, most centrally that biology defines male and female roles in work and family. Seven potent myths have shaped the growth of the dual-earner family:...

Based on the Conservation of Resources theory, we used data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS I, 1995-1996; N=1779) to estimate by covariance structure analysis the direct and indirect effects of work and family demands, resources, and support on psychological distress. In a new application of the theory, w...

Most employed parents, many in dual-earner couples, are at work when their children get out of school, generating parental concerns about children’s welfare after school. Parental concerns are hypothesized to be related to respondent and partner work hours, respondent schedule control, and child’s unsupervised time and to give rise to job disruptio...

In this study, we focus on community resources – specifically, children's school and school activity schedules, or school resource fit (SRF) – as a contextual variable influencing family-role quality (FRQ) among employed parents of school-aged (grades K-12) children in a sample of 58 Boston-area couples (N=116). We found that SRF is a significant p...

We used data from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS I) (N = 2,031) to compare three models of how work-family conflict and enrichment might operate to predict well-being (mental health, life satisfaction, affect balance, partner relationship quality). We found no support for a relative-difference model in which the conflict-enrich...

Several scholars have noted that community resources might facilitate or hinder employees’ ability to meet their many work and family demands, thereby affecting their psychological well-being. However, this is the first study to estimate these relationships using a newly developed quantitative measure of community resource fit that assesses the sat...

Dual-earner couples now work significantly more hours than in the past, but few couple-level studies examine whether work hours are linked to mental health and quality-of-life outcomes. In 2001, Jacobs and Gerson proposed that combined spouse work hours would better predict outcomes than would spouses’ individual work hours. Longitudinal data from...

Many employees, while at work, have elder-caregiving responsibilities and corre- sponding concerns about the elders’ safety, care, and welfare. These concerns likely escalate when work environments have inflexible schedules or penalize employees for using flexible scheduling options. Caregiving concerns often lead to job withdrawal (i.e., planned j...

This chapter discusses current demographic trends and then looks at the early research on multiple roles, examining the then dominant underlying theoretical perspectives and the findings that grew out of that viewpoint. It turns to the present, once again laying out newer theories and associated empirical results. Most of the chapter is devoted to...

We describe the development and validation of a quantitative measure of community resource fit; i.e., satisfaction with the extent to which community resources meet the needs of working families of school-aged children. The measure has good psychometric properties, and preliminary results suggest that the measure warrants further study. The measure...

In a sample of 55 dual-earner families with children aged 8 to 14 in which the mothers are registered nurses regularly working either day shifts (typically 7: 00 a. m. to 3: 00 p. m.) or evening shifts (typically 3: 00 p. m. to 11: 00 p. m.), we estimated the within-couple relationship between the wife's work variables (i.e., work shift, work hours...

Burnout, a widely studied syndrome, has been defined as comprising three factorially distinct symptoms: emotional exhaustion, decreased sense of professional efficacy, and cynicism. The most common measure is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, I996). We identified and corrected two flaws in the MBI, namely: (a) items pu...

Many U.S. employees with children work nonstandard hours, yet we know little about the linkages among maternal shift schedules, mothers’ and fathers’ parenting behaviors, and children’s socioemotional outcomes. In a sample of 55 dual-earner families with children age 8 to 14 years and mothers working day versus evening shifts, the authors found tha...

Negotiation and its use in academic medicine have not been studied. Little is known about faculty experience with negotiation or its potential benefits for academe. Barriers to negotiation and how they can be addressed, especially for faculty without perceived skill in negotiation, are unknown. To better understand the problems that such faculty ex...

Research on work/family issues is currently being done by investigators from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, occupational health, sociology, and, less centrally, organizational behavior. Such energy and diversity might be expected to yield significant advances; however, for the most part, this promise has not been realized. Progress...

The relation of well-being to involvement in multiple roles was examined in a study of 134 Caucasian women. All subjects were married and mothers of at least one preschool child; 50 were also paid workers. Two indices of well-being were used: (a) self-esteem; and (b) satisfaction with one's current role pattern. No differences in level of well-bein...

Employed parents' concern about their children's welfare after school (PCAST) has been linked to psychological well-being. To explore the risk factors for PCAST, the authors estimate the effects of parent job flexibility and commuting time, child time unsupervised after school, and partner after-school availability on PCAST in a sample of 243 paren...

The mismatch between employed parents’ work schedules and their children's school schedules creates the structural underpinning for an as-yet-unstudied stressor, namely, parental after-school stress, or the degree of parents’ concern about their children's welfare after school. We estimate the relationship between parental after-school stress and p...

Employed parents’ concern about their children’s welfare after school (PCAST) has been linked to psychological well-being. To explore the risk factors for PCAST, the authors estimate the effects of parent job flexibility and commuting time, child time unsupervised after school, and partner after-school availability on PCAST in a sample of 243 paren...

Major demographic trends are affecting the work schedules of U.S. employees with likely consequences for health and quality-of-life outcomes. These trends include long work hours, at least for some groups of employees, and an increasing proportion of employees in the U.S. and other countries who are working nonstandard work schedules. This chapter...

The quality of one's marital relationship is gaining recognition as a potential stressor associated with negative health outcomes. Purpose: In this study, we estimated the relationship between marital-role quality and three psychobiological stress indicators (self-reported stress, cortisol levels, and ambulatory blood pressure). Participants were 1...

There are ominous signs that new versions of biological determinism have returned, with the claim that women are not meant, by nature or by psyche, for achievement. Myths about gender difference now "prove" that women should be confined to jobs that use their special "relational" abilities, that women's brains are not designed for leadership, and t...

To better understand the career satisfaction and factors related to retention of women physicians who work reduced hours and are in dual-earner couples in comparison to their full-time counterparts. Survey of a random sample of female physicians between 25 and 50 years of age working within 25 miles of Boston, whose names were obtained from the Boa...

The obstacles faced by today's women in the workplace bear out the truth in the old adage that history repeats itself. The maternal wall, the ideal worker, and the ideal homemaker beliefs are current iterations of the century-old tendency to mark women as suited for the home and men as suited for the workplace (Albee & Perry, 1998; Coltrane, 1996;...

Researchers and practitioners have cited the advantage of such flexible work scheduling options as flex‐time, compressed workweeks, job sharing, and reduced hours for employees. The assumption underlying these options has been that more flexible schedules allow employees to meet their family requirements and still work a sufficient number of hours...

This paper examines medical managers' beliefs about the impact reduced-hour career paths for physicians has on organizational effectiveness. The findings of this exploratory inductive study of 17 medical managers at nine medical organizations in the Boston area suggest that managers believe the benefits of reduced-hour physicians (RHPs) far outweig...

Strong beliefs persist about the negative effects of maternal employment on women, their marriages, and their children, in spite of considerable systematic research indicating that, on average, employment has positive effects. The underlying assumption is that the roles of wife and mother are "natural" roles and are therefore performed without undu...

Strong beliefs persist about the negative effects of maternal employment on women, their marriages, and their children, in spite of considerable systematic research indicating that, on average, employment has positive effects. The underlying assumption is that the roles of wife and mother are "natural" roles and are therefore performed without undu...

To evaluate the experience of gender discrimination among a limited sample of women in academic medicine, specifically, the role of discrimination in hindering careers, coping mechanisms, and perceptions of what institutions and leaders of academic medicine can do to improve the professional workplace climate for women. In-depth, semistructured tel...

A couple-level analysis with a sample of 105 female reduced-hours physicians and their full-time–employed husbands found individual and spouse crossover effects: Each spouse's ratings of own schedule fit predict own job-role quality; wives' ratings of partner/family schedule fit predict their marital-role quality, with a similar trend for husbands;...

To understand the characteristics of women physicians who work reduced hours in dual-earner couples and how such work schedules affect the quality of the marital role, parental role, and job role, as well as indicators of psychological distress, burnout, career satisfaction, and life satisfaction. Survey of a random sample of female physicians betw...

Career–marriage conflict (CMC) reflects the reality that for many college seniors, the next decade of their lives will be spent launching a career, often a very demanding one, building a long-term romantic relationship, and coordinating the demands of two careers. We focus on the antecedents and correlates of these concerns. Based on social-role th...

In a random sample of 98 full-time and reduced-hours female doctors in dual-earner couples with at least one child younger than 14, the authors ask whether objective work hours or perceived job demands better predict psychological distress and whether work hours or parent-role quality moderate the relationship between perceived job demands and psyc...

In this stratified random sample of 98 married full-time and reduced-hours female physicians with children, the authors tested the hypothesis that the relationship between work hours and marital-role quality would be mediated by the proportion of low-schedule-control household tasks performed by the physicians. The hypothesis was supported: Physici...

This study examined the perceptions of undergraduate women in male-dominated academic areas. First-year and final-year female undergraduates in a male-dominated academic area (i.e., math, science, or engineering) reported higher levels of discrimination and stereotype threat than women in a female-dominated academic area (i.e., arts, education, hum...

La flexibilidad en el puesto de trabajo se ha convertido en un asunto de vital importancia en el actual mundo empresarial. Debido a la necesidad de combinar trabajo, familia, comunidad y otras funciones de la vida el tiempo se está convirtiendo en un factor esencial. En este artículo se expone cómo la opción de una reducción de horas de trabajo es...

“I’ve got to find a way off this treadmill! Life istoo frantic. By the time I get the kids dressed, fed,and off to school, fight the traffic into town, andscramble for a parking spot, I feel like I’ve alreadyput in a day’s work. And then the whirlwindbegins. And then later I have to beg out of thosedarned 4:00 p.m. meetings, which I know willdrag on p...

The lives of women and men, the relationships that they establish, and their work have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, but the dominant theories driving research in these areas have not. In this article, the authors argue that the facts underlying the assumptions of the classical theories of gender and multiple roles have changed so radi...

The lives of women and men, the relationships that they establish, and their work have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, but the dominant theories driving research in these areas have not. In this article, the authors argue that the facts underlying the assumptions of the classical theories of gender and multiple roles have changed so radi...

In a random sample of 286 full-time-employed dual-earner couples, we tested 3 competing hypotheses: when wives earn more than their husbands, (a) each partner's marital-role quality (MRQ) decreases; (b) his MRQ increases, whereas effects on her MRQ are mixed; and (c) relationships vary with gender-role beliefs (i.e., gender-role ideology and subjec...

Interest in reduced-hours career options has been sparked by recent studies indicating an increase in the work week, especially among professional and managerial employees, a preference among all employees to reduce work hours substantially, and the perception that the absence of reduced-hours career options is an obstacle to professional advanceme...

BACKGROUND: Gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment are common in medical practice and may be even more prevalent in academic medicine. OBJECTIVE: To examine the prevalence of gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment among medical school faculty and the associations of gender-based discrimination with number of publications, care...

Although reduced-hours work is widely thought to decrease distress, empirical literature relating absolute number of hours worked to distress outcomes is inconsistent. Perhaps the trade-off between giving up some aspects of work for more nonwork time is more stressful for some employees than for others. The authors tested the hypothesis that diffic...

This paper discusses the part-time professional career option, a career alternative thought to promote work-family integration, and asks whether this alternative would increase responsiveness to fluctuations in the demand for professionals. For illustrative purposes, we focus on the current oversupply of physicians in the United States, and discuss...

The authors studied number of hours worked and estimated its relationship to burnout in a nonrandom sample of 141 married physicians. It was hypothesized that this relationship is mediated by a process called fit, conceptualized as the extent to which workers realize the various components of their work-family strategies. Results of structural equa...

The authors studied number of hours worked and estimated its relationship to burnout in a nonrandom sample of 141 married physicians. It was hypothesized that this relationship is mediated by a process called fit, conceptualized as the extent to which workers realize the various components of their work–family strategies. Results of structural equa...

Work-family research has been dominated by an emphasis on conflict, an approach . challenged by inconsistent findings on work-family conflict (WFC) and research. demonstrating salutary effects of multiple-role involvement. The construct of “fit,” or the. extent to which work schedules meet the family system’s needs, makes no assumption of conflict....

With the coming of the new century, talk of change and new beginnings is everywhere—the new family, the new workforce, the new corporation, the new employee-employer contract. In the midst of all this talk of change, however, policies and practices in the work-life area remain surprisingly the same. No innovative ways of framing the issues have cap...

This paper examines the factors that affect the decision made by dual-earner couples concerning the possibility of one (or both) partners working a reduced-hours schedule. We rely on a comprehensive review of the literature on part-time work among dual-earner couples and on the factors that affect the decisions couples make about their work hours a...

BACKGROUND: Studies have found that female faculty publish less, have slower career progress, and generally have a more difficult time in academic careers than male faculty. The relation of family (dependent) responsibilities to gender and academic productivity is unclear. OBJECTIVE: To describe dependent responsibilities by gender and to identify...

Research on work/family issues is currently being done by investigators from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, occupational health, sociology, and, less centrally, organizational behavior. Such energy and diversity might be expected to yield significant advances; however, for the most part, this promise has not been realized. Progress...

PURPOSE: To determine (1) the prevalence of mentoring relationships for U.S. medical school junior faculty; (2) the quality of these mentoring relationships; (3) any variation by gender or race; and (4) the relationship between mentoring and junior faculty members' perceptions of institutional professional support; research-, teaching-, and clinica...

To evaluate the relationships between both internal and external career-motivating factors and academic productivity (as measured by the total numbers of publications) among full-time medical faculty, and whether these relationships differ for men and women. In 1995 a 177-item survey was mailed to 3,013 full-time faculty at 24 randomly selected U.S...

This study addressed how parents' relative involvement in child care is related to marital-role quality and psychological distress. These relationships were examined in a random sample of 133 mothers and fathers in dual-earner couples. Regression analyses employing hierarchical linear modeling techniques indicated that the more fathers participated...

In a random sample of 242 full-time employed men and women in dual-earner couples (N = 484), this study estimated the relations between (a) his experiences on the job over time and her distress over time and (b) her experiences on the job over time and his distress over time. In addition, we explored whether the crossover effects were due primarily...

Using an economically diverse random sample of 300 full-time employed men and women in dual-earner couples from two communities in the Northeast, we estimated the relation between the direction and magnitude of disagreement about gender role ideology (GRI) within couples and psychological distress. We conceptualized GRI within couples as both the c...

Serious questions have been raised about the common practice of relying on self-report measures to assess the relation between subjective role experiences on the one hand and both mental and physical health symptoms on the other. Such self-report measures may reflect a common underlying dimension of negative affectivity (NA), thereby leading to spu...

Examines the extent to which family and work impact on each other. Importance of work/family issues to the economic viability of organizations and for the welfare of families; How progress has been hampered; Details on the study.

The stories we tell about the linkages between gender and health are shaped by the paradigms that guide our inquiries. Paradigms direct our attention away from certain phenomena and toward others. In particular, the dominant paradigms in the study of gender and health have promoted studies of differences, not similarities. Even in the face of stron...

In this analysis, with data collected from a random sample of 265 employed dual-earner couples, we estimated the association between time spent on housework tasks on one hand and psychological distress on the other. Based on the literature relating job control to mental health outcomes, we hypothesized that hours spent in low-schedule-control tasks...

The stories we tell about the linkages between gender and health are shaped by the paradigms that guide our inquiries. Paradigms direct our attention away from certain phenomena and toward others. In particular the dominant paradigms in the study of gender and health have promoted studies of differences, not similarities. Even in the face of strong...

Building on the Job-Strain Theory, we estimated three relationships in a random sample of 201 full-time employed men and women in dual-earner couples interviewed three times over a 2-year period. We first estimated the main effects relationships between change over time in employees' experiences of job demands and job control and change over time i...

The change in the United States from a manufacturing economy to a service economy has important implications for theoretical models of the relationships between job characteristics and workers' psychological distress. A sample of 600 men and women employed full-time were recruited to test 2 theoretical models. The job demand–control model posits th...

The change in the United States from a manufacturing economy to a service economy has important implications for theoretical models of the relationships between job characteristics and workers' psychological distress. A sample of 600 men and women employed full-time were recruited to test 2 theoretical models. The job demand-control model posits th...